Follow Us

More

Comic Book Cover Homages to Norman Rockwell's 'Freedom From Want'

In I Can't Cover What I Am, I spotlight a collection of comic book covers (of at least ten covers) that follow a specific theme.

Today, since it is Thanksgiving, the theme is comic book covers that homage Norman Rockwell's iconic "Freedom From Want" painting. This painting was one of a set of four that were produced by Rockwell in response to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's history 1941 Presidential State of the Union address. In that address, President Roosevelt outlined four freedoms that all Americans should have, namely: Freedom of speech, Freedom of worship, Freedom from want and Freedom from fear.

In 1942, Rockwell began to put together paintings to illustrate each of those freedoms. He contacted the United States Office of War Information to see if they were interested in him doing the paintings as part of an official propaganda poster program, and he was shockingly rebuffed! He was told that the previous war (World War I) had posters done by magazine cover artists, but for this war, they wanted to use more notable painters (so weird, right?). So instead, Rockwell went to his regular employer, the Saturday Evening Post, and they ran a series of essays about the freedoms in early 1943, each one accompanied by the respective Rockwell painting (the paintings also went on the cover of the issue, of course). The magazine began selling print sets of the four paintings. Amusingly enough, the OWI now contacted Rockwell, as they were now VERY interested in using his paintings to help the war effort. They produced 2.5 million sets of these prints to sell to the help the war effort.

While Rockwell did paint this in November of 1942, it is interesting to note that it first appeared in print in March of 1943 and is about specifically freedom from want more than Thanksgiving, per se, but of course it has become adopted as a iconic symbol of American Thanksgiving.

So iconic that many comic book covers have chose to homage it over the years. Here are ten examples:

Perhaps the most notable one is Carlos Pacheco's homage from JSA #54, as part of that series' recurring theme of doing holiday issues...

The odd thing about this Bryan Hitch cover for Fantastic Four #564 is that it promises that the inside of the comic book won't be lame like the cover, but, well, the cover is freakin' awesome. So....huh?

Comic book homages in general have only become prolific in the last decade or so, so this Anna-Marie Cool and Jeff Albrecht cover for Barbie Fashion #37 might be the first example we have of this homage...